On Sunday 26 June 2005 09:58 am, Fernando Vilas wrote:
> Not trying to start a flame war here,  .... 

> the easiest 
> thing to do is to learn to use ifconfig and iwconfig from the command line. 
> ? But that's not a good way to do things for the average WinXP user who
> already thinks that *nix is too complex.

Starting, stopping and restarting these services this way has made laptop 
networking  much easier for me:

/etc/init.d/networking
/etc/init.d/pcmcia
/etc/init.d/hotplug

Between that and a script to swap out /etc/network/interfaces, it's easy to 
swap between dhcp and the simple static network Fernando helped me set up six  
years ago.  This holds true even when I'm having hardware, bios and funky 
dhcp problems at LSU or coffee shops.  The scripts scrub everything down to 
the hardware level and the badness goes away.  

If those scripts were not there, I'd end up making my own and they would 
probably suck.  

Having scripts for other services there is nice too.  There are more than 80 
of them on this machine.  

Distributions like Mepis and Xandros use KDE and their own GUI to do the same 
thing for many of the same services.  The problem then becomes navigating the 
GUI to find the magic box.  Some people are better at this than they are with 
magic words.  There's no need to condem people to XP.  Free software does the 
same thing with greater transparency.  Calling people XP lusers because they  
don't use ifconig regularly, might be interpreted as a flame.

Are we grumpy today?


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